Core i7 or 1090T? GTX 470/480 or HD 5870?

Hello and welcome to the forums
2 GTX 480s perform better than 5870s but they produce more noise, have more power consumption and run hotter too.

i aware of better performance of 480's, but also if i choose them i must buy a new PSU and that costs me additional 300$. they are not cost effective. is the i7 930 better option for the future then 1090T?

For gaming you can get cheaper:

CPU:
i5-750/760
or
Phenom II X4 955/965

Video card(s)
2 x HD5850 (for the Intel or AMD)
2 x GTX460 (only for Intel, AMD doesn't have modern crossfire mobos)

to OP
Well,like mosox said you can go with 2 GTX 460s, they perform very well(about 20% faster than 1 GTX 480) and on par with 2 5870s in most games.
to mosox
I think you mean AMD doesn't have modern "SLI" motherboards,right ?

Yep, sorry about that.

Go with Maziar's suggest. The only thing to note is that I think he ment that 2 GTX 460s is about 20% faster then 1 GTX 480.

hmmmmm.....isnt for gaming only. the main question that i ask myself is which brand of gpu should i buy?alng with that, which processor?

if i go with nvidia solution, i must go on Intel system.

on the other hand, if i buy amd graphic card, i must go on amd system solution....aaarrggh, which one to choose? HELP MEEEEEEEE!!!

From Guru3d.com:
The minimum PSU wattage for 2 GTX480's in SLI is 850 watts, 1000 watts is recommended. That power supply needs to have (in total accumulated) at least 55 to 60 Amps available on the +12 volt rails.
The minimum PSU for 2 GTX460's in SLI is 750 watts.

GTX480's in SLI vs. GTX460's in SLI will result in ~25%-30% more gaming performance, and depends on the game. (In Metro 2033 on high settings, the difference is more like +45% more performance.)
GTX480 SLI 3DMark Vantage (GPU): ~29,500
GTX460 SLI 3DMark Vantage (GPU): ~25,000

GTX480's in SLI will use ~700 watts peak @ 57dB, 93c
GTX460's in SLI will use ~450 watts peak @ 48dB, 80c

Cost to play games at full load 5 days a week/4 hours per day:
GTX480 SLI
monthly: 8.72 Euros/$11.89 US
yearly: 104.64 Euros/$142.70 US

GTX460 SLI
monthly: 5.60 Euros/$7.64 US
yearly: 67.20 Euros/$91.64 US

Before you shell out for two GTX480s, you should definitely read these articles, which indicated that the GTX480s will be bottlenecked until 2560x1600 resolutions. The 5870s, the 470s or the 460s would be better options.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/newegg-combo-toms-h...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/overclock-cpu-build...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pcie-geforce-gtx-48...

to deweycd
Yep just corrected it,thanks for pointing out  
to OP
Well,first of all it isn't a must to get an AMD card with AMD CPUs because X58 chipsets support both SLI and CF,so there won't be any problems with either Nvidia/ATI paired with Intel CPUs.
As for AMD,well its new chipsets support CF only, if you need SLI,then you have to go with 980a SLI chipset which isn't as good as chips like 890FX etc.
So if you worry about SLI and AMD,then go with i7 930/950 and 2 GTX 460s(brands like XFX,EVGA,ASUS,Gigabyte are quite good)

Please wait until the ATI 6xxx cards come out at least. Don't buy/upgrade now. In a few months you'll feel stupid for paying so much for the system.

If you can, wait until Sandy Bridge/Bulldozer comes out. What's your current specs?

ya you should wait nVidia 500 series out and it will be 3 - 4x faster.
my suggestion is buying one single GTX460 OC for now. it is good to run any game with decent performance

Kepler? Thats in a year to be positive.

And there is absolutely nothing available in terms of performance right now, for all we know it could be weaker than a GTX480 but much more power efficient.

Kepler is AT LEASE 1 year away. On the other hand, the ATI 6xxx cards should hit retail mid November. Only about a month and a half away.

It's the Nvidia GTX 475, 485, and 495 that should be out around the same time as the ATI 6000 series. The GTX 485 should feature the full 512 shader processor, and the GTX 495 should be a dual chip card. Expect there to be plenty of options, and a lot more fanboy wars, in time for the Holidays.

my current specs? p4 2.0 northwood, wd 80 gb, hd 2400 pro.....now you see why i cant wait.   well, i live in croatia. if the 6xxx series goes out in november, and late december, that means it will be in stock at february by us, and it will cost 50% more than in any other normal country. at least.

hmmmmm, my problem is if i choose radeons, i will have problems with tesselation....

Buy then the Intel mobo + CPU now and a GX 460. It will be good for gaming on full HD for at least a year (not the highest settings on some games). When the ATI 6 series/new Nvidia 4 series hit the stores, if it's something outstanding sell the 460 and get what you like (one ATI or Nvidia, two in SLI or CF, whatever). If it's nothing special, get a second GTX 460.

You said that it isn't for gaming only, what else?

Hmm, why not i7-950? But first, calculate the cost..

In my opinion, 9800 GT 512Mb is still working well, and it's very dirt cheap today. It also eats little power consumption. @Newegg this Zotac card is only $69. That is, if you decide to wait for 6xxx or Nvidia 5xx ...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

You wont.
The games that uses tessellation to a heavy scale cant be maxed out using a single GTX480 anyways, so you wont miss out much.

hmmmm, my plan is to buy 2 of them.....main concern, now, is to find adequate PSU for them

ohhh, god, i said i own scythe kamariki 750w psu :S

Oh god another one of these threads. Give it time, flame war. Anyway, dual GTX 480s is pretty dumb is you ask me. If i were you, id wait until at LEAST 6xxx. For those who say kepler, yeah, how bout you just wait till computers do the dishes for you too!   Anyway, 6xxx is launced mid to late october, available early november probably. Sandy Bridge is closer towards the end of this year, begininng of next, so if you can stretch it, i would. But definitely wait till 6xxx. Your 480's MIGHT look like a hot mess when it comes out. And it cant hurt to wait a little. In any event, very likely single 480 beat by single 6870, rumors say 20%, and it probs runs cooler and use less energy. 750w might not be enough for dual 480 and overclocking. I generally say no less than 850 watts for dual 480s. But i recommend against them anyway. I recommend planning to buy dual cards in any event. Buy the strongest single card you need, then add a second later when you need it.

If he is willing to spend $1000 and 2 GTX 480's, im assuming he's willing to spend $400-500 on a 6870  

Exactly, which is why i recommend buying a high end single GPU, and then another when they are cheaper and you need it. Much more cost effective, and better.

im living in fuc**** Croatia. Prices on our grounds are roghly 1,5-2x on "normal" countries. and now, i found gtx thats priced around 500$ so i want to buy it, and probably i will. One. and add another in the near future. but first thing first, i will buy HX 1000, and sell my brand new scythe. i cant wait for the 6xxx series, couse it will hit our grounds after new year probably. and the prices in our country will probably be around 50% higher than in others.

According to this news item, the 6870 will only be comparable in performance to the 5850:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/northern-southern-isla...

Which is purely speculation as Bart Pro/XT were also rumored to also have from 1120/1280s shaders and named as HD6750/6770.

If you check out my poll thread, you will see an article where they reference the problems AMD has been having with the chip manufacuring process.

If TSMC still has problems with 40nm then the GTX 460 would have never existed. If you mean the switch from 32nm to 40nm, that's OLD news.

Remember Digitimes was the source that also said the HD600 launch was pushed back to Novmeber.

"As Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) changed the schedule of its new manufacturing process causing AMD's Radeon HD 6000-series to continue adopting its 40nm process, rumors about the new GPU's lower-than-expected performance and launch schedule have been circulating in the IT market, therefore, AMD has decided to officially launch its Radeon HD 6000-series on October 19, a week later than the original schedule of October 12, with the Radeon HD 6870 possibly the first for launch."

Thats OLD news.

The original HD6000 (N.I) was planned for 32nm, but since TSMC and Glofo jumped canceled 32nm and jumped directly to 28nm LAST YEAR AMD was forced to stick with 40nm and whip out something new, which became the HD6000 now (S.I).

AMD has re-designated the codenames though so things got pretty fuzzy in that aspect.

You honestly think AMD is going backwards? No, its just a rumor of a name change, from a fake chart and site. Lemme put it this way, what we think of as the replacement to 5770, wether its called 6770 or 6870, should come out with about GTX 470 performance, give or take. What we imagine replacing 5870, wether its 6870 or 6970, should be 20-30% above GTX 480. This is all according to rumors and math.

The quote he posted didn't say anything about going backwards, it said lower than expected performance, and what math, lol, do you have that shows its going to have gtx 470 performance ?
What its going to have is a new name on the box, AMD video cards, and it will probably be shiny ,  

I said probably. And that it was based off math and speculation. If they say close to 5870, and the 470 is close to 5870 performance, how isnt it reasonable to say around 470 performance? They all say above 5850, and i doubt it would go far or at all above 5870, so thats right where the 470 lies.

I'm assuming that if the 6870 is only comparable to the 5850, then they must also be producing something a little bit later in the series that will surpass the 5970 and anything else they currently have on the market.

That seems backwards.... don't you mean the 6770 ~= 5850? (Such as the case with the 4850 ~= 5750).

You still arent listening to the name changes. Its like a 6770=5850.

The 6770 should be comparable to the 5850, of course this is not 100% accurate info but it would be the most logical out of the rumors that we have seen to this date.



More rumors :

http://vr-zone.com/articles/rumour-amd-radeon-hd-6870-i...

http://vr-zone.com/articles/-rumour-amd-barts-xt-hd-677...

So IMO the 6870 should be around 20% faster than a 480 while pulling less juice from the PSU which normally equates to a card that will also run cooler.

I'm just referring to the link from Tom's Hardware. On the chart it says on the "Relative Performance" bottom row, that the 6870 is "Better than 5850", meaning not as good as the 5870.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/northern-southern-isla...

Well lets use some common sense, do you actually think that the 6850 will have 800 SP's (same as the current 5770)?

IMO it would be the largest AMD fail in history if those numbers were legit, not to mention the 6870 having only 960 SP's which of course tells us that it will not stand a chance against the current GTX 480.

@ OvrClkr, Its been rumored that the x7xx series will be renamed x8xx and the x8xx x9xx

Also if you payed attention those are BARTS chips which is also another indicator of the renaming scheme as parts is the x7xx of the 6xxx series...

I would wait and see what happens with the latest 6xxx series Release and buy a i7 920 with a good mobo, RoG if possible.

Who knows what they did architecturally to the cards, maybe they don't have as many stream processors for the same performance. Nvidia's processors are stronger than AMD's stream processors, which allows them to have 480>1600 in most cases.
We'll just have to wait and see...not too long now, hopefully.

ATI and Nvidia have completely different architectures (with the ATI being much more modern - every block of SP units can execute up to 5 independent instructions simultaneously in 1 clock) and IF somebody optimizaed a game for the ATI architecture the result would be the HD 5770 blowing out of the water the GTX 480 (1360 vs 1344.96 GFLOP).

I find that chart hard to believe. Think of it this way. Almost all rumors have the 6870 (6970) having 1920 shaders. This makes sense. If 960 Barts shaders beats 1440 Cypress shaders, without much of any other changes, then they are getting 50% more efficient shaders. This makes 1920 Cayman shaders equivalent to an outrageous 2880 Cypress shaders. An increase of 80% over the 5870. Now shaders count doesnt mean everything, but it does represent other things, and an 80% shader increase would net a very large performance increase. Now, what if the 6770 has 1280 shaders like the other rumors say? 13% more efficient shaders. That means 1920 shaders would be like 2160 on Cypress. And guess what that is, a 35% increase. Now, while this math is far from perfect, to sum it up, if they can get 960 Barts shaders to be equivalent to 1440 Cypress shaders (most other components havent changed much anyway) then what do you think they would do with 1920 shaders? It would just be too high if you ask me. 1280 also fits math better. Also, the chart saying 1280 looks more official AMD business. The other one was taken and changed from a german forum saying the 5770 had a 256 bit bus, so theres your accuracy. Seems fan made to me.

I find it hard to think that they would put out a 6850 that has less shaders then the 5850 unless they have made drastic improvements to the card overall. As this card is just an upgrade and not a complete overhull then it is unlikely they have achieved this improvement. I would say the chart is likely incorrect or else AMD just made a huge error in judgement.

Today's Tom's Hardware article referrs to the Barts chip and the 6870 as mid-range offerings. So it looks like the numbering scheme is different (6850 = 5770, 6870 = 5850); and the new mid-range cards will exceed the performance of the previous high-end 58xx series. The best is yet to come, but you will have to wait until after the launch of the mid-range cards in a couple weeks.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/gt-430-radeon-hd-north...

There are a lot of rumors flying around. Tom's very likely doesnt know much more than we do about this. But anyway, this isnt the high end we are all seeing. Thats the best i can put it.

[Rant] I hate how manufacturers keep changing their number schemes. Even if they don't change it this time overall it's a pain. You start to understand their number scheme and bam, they change it again. [/Rant]